Memory Alpha talk:Disambiguation
About the use of disambiguation pages Right now, there are several pages claiming to be "disambiguation pages" (DP), such as Alpha, Beta, Gamma... I don't know if these are really necessary (or valid DPs at all). In my opinion, a DP should be created only if there are several "objects" that are normally referred to using the same term. Enterprise, for example, is such a term, because it is used to refer to one of many starships as well as the latest series. Alpha, though, could be a disambiguation page for Alpha (Jem'Hadar), Alpha Quadrant and Alpha system and others, but definitely shouldn't include links to articles like Treaty of Alpha Cygnus IX (no one would refer to that treaty as simply "Alpha"). In this case, the search function of this wiki seems to be good enough (try searching for "Zeta", for example). -- Cid Highwind 12:55, 17 Dec 2004 (CET) :Yeah, this was occuring to me as I wrote Beta through Epsilon; Alpha was created by someone else (Mike maybe?) and that's what gave me the idea. Wikipedia, though, does do these basically the way we are right now: Wikipedia:Alpha, Wikipedia:Beta, &c. -- Steve 00:32, 18 Dec 2004 (CET) XYZ (disambiguation)? :Copied from Talk:Kaelon (disambiguation), regarding the use of disambiguation pages ''not being placed at the "natural title" as described in this guideline. Might better be discussed here.'' I'm not sure about the usefulness of this (and other, similar pages), either. In the beginning, a disambiguation page was created when there were two or more articles that could be addressed using the same term. The disambiguation page was created at that term, to have a destination for every link that wrongly links to it instead of the proper article title. A good example of this is USS Enterprise, which links to all nine articles about ships called USS Enterprise. Now, a disambiguation page is often used to list articles that share a part of their name - most of those article would never be addressed by just that part, though, so the usefulness of the disambiguation is dubious at best. For example, Kaelon could refer to the species or the star (whose article might not ever be created), but surely not to Kaelon starships. An even worse example would be Alpha, a so-called disambiguation page listing all occurences of "Alpha" in an article title. But it doesn't stop there - often, these disambiguation pages aren't even created with the title they are designed to disambiguate. Instead they have a qualifier "(disambiguation)" added to them, making them inherently useless to find accidentally misleading links somewhere. I think this practice has to be rethought. -- Cid Highwind 10:15, 30 Sep 2005 (UTC) Having spent the better part of the day with disambiguations, I want to backtrack on the above opinion (just a little, though ;)). If there's one meaning that is obviously preferred to all others and there are more than two possible articles with that natural title, a disambiguation located at "XYZ (disambiguation)" seems to be the best option. I still think that many of the now existing disambiguation pages should not be placed at such a location, though, and will start to move some pages around. A disambiguation page at the non-disambiguated title should still be the norm, not the exception. BTW, for "preferred meanings" as described above, I created the template . -- Cid Highwind 21:53, 21 Nov 2005 (UTC)